The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Thus is the past erased. Despair welled up in Millsy’s heart like black syrup.

  He turned the knob of the third door. It opened and let him into a pitch-black passage.

  Warm, sewage-scented wind gusted into his face. He could hear water rushing fast and far down.

  After a stunned instant, he chuckled. The sound echoed, bouncing off walls into infinity.

  How could he have forgotten?

  Tapping gingerly outward with his right boot, he encountered the crumbling stone edge of the walkway. Gravel bounced down and down and down.

  His left hand encountered a clutch of wet pipes running horizontal to the ledge. The pipes were at the right height for handholds, but they were thick with slime; not many more people used this little shortcut, then, than they had ten years ago.

  He hadn’t felt ready for Boone earlier this afternoon. But now he did. How could he have forgotten Boone? Boone would not have forgotten him—in fact, within the bounds of propriety, he could not, since it was he who had incited Millsy to leave the court!

  Millsy chuckled again and began to edge along the walkway.

  Millsy was in the Kingsburg Waterworks. The light of the daemon glares nailed to the rock behind his and Boone’s chairs cast a streaky brightness on the water of the reservoir, which stretched out from the cliff much farther than the light carried. Boone never permitted anyone except his subordinates to accompany him on his “routine” boat trips into the blackness, but Millsy had heard that it took several hours to reach the other side. It was difficult to imagine the years and manpower which had been necessary to hollow out such a vast space under the city.

  Pipes at least three feet in diameter plunged down from the roof of the reservoir, into the water, like the proboscises of monstrous flies. Toward the edge of the light, the copper trunks grew as thick as a forest. Among them, stone support columns, inside which six of the pipes could have fitted comfortably, reached up to the invisible roof. The rumble of the pump daemons at work in nearby caves could be felt as a vibration. Boone’s predilection for entertaining visitors on this sparsely furnished ledge mere inches above the reservoir, rather than in his sumptuous office, was, Millsy had deduced as much as fifteen years earlier, symptomatic of certain impulses, dangerously akin to sadism, which had grown from his boredom with his post.

  Boone Skinner, Comptroller of the Kingsburg Waterworks, was king of his underground realm. He did as he liked. Valued by the Queen for his handling and administrative skills, and celebrated for his eccentricity, he was a treasure of the Burg, a rotund blond man who ought to have been jolly. In reality he had a gloomy manner far more pronounced now than the last time Millsy had seen him. His detractors said that he was not as pessimistic as he pretended: that, in fact, he thought better of himself than of any other man in Kingsburg. He lived in one of Kingsburg’s rougher neighborhoods with his wife, Betsy, who was so common that she dropped the ends of her words. After absconding from the court, Millsy had stayed in their home while Boone taught him all he knew of the handler’s art.

  The comptroller’s pale blue eyes stared meditatively at Millsy. His thumbs coaxed a thin ringing from the rim of his wineglass.

  “It is that I regret my youth sometimes, nothing more,” Millsy said, sipping the deliciously chilled ale Boone had served him. “And the indignity of the snub, perhaps. But that will pass. The last strings have been cut.” He paused. “Now I know I could not live in court again.”

  “You are made of stronger stuff than the rest of them,” Boone said. “I thought so from the beginning. Now I see I was right.”

  Millsy remembered the Teilsche Parallel. It was never far from his mind; but in light of what Boone had just said, the memory was especially painful. If Boone had seen him then, would he say that Millsy was made of strong stuff? Millsy had only been seventeen when he was in the army, but surely the stuff that a man is made of does not change. Once a coward, always a coward. All the machinations he’d put into getting his ambassadorship had been part of an elaborate, ongoing attempt to convince himself otherwise. Only when he discovered that he had the blood of a trickster had he finally accepted the truth.

  “Perhaps the only difference between me and the rest of them is that I have weathered so many failures,” he said. “Are you aware that when I was seventeen, I deserted? I was recruited into the Teilsche 198th Infantry. I only lasted three months.”

  “I was not aware of that,” Boone said.

  “I shan’t bind you to secrecy. It’s not as though it makes any difference now. The circus is effectively outside the law. At least half the roustabouts are deserters.”

  “Are you finding it satisfying?” Boone asked. “Commoners’ entertainment. It’s not much of a job for a handler. Especially one with trickster blood. You could be so much greater.”

  “But have no desire to be. Do I seem discontented?”

  “I haven’t heard from you in ten years, Gift. How should I know whether you are content? I did not even know whether you were alive.”

  The rebuke hung in the air. Millsy forced himself to look Boone in the eye. “I am not discontented any longer. I had to come here to know that, but now I am certain of it.”

  “Good,” Boone said. “And good that you left when you did. They came to my house. I was in hot water for a while. It was lucky that Royal Sister Jacilithra spoke up for me.” Pride rang in his voice as he mentioned the Royal.

  Millsy sighed. “Boone, you are a better friend than I deserve. Tell me—they don’t still hold that grudge, do they?”

  “Gift, they were going to kill you.”

  “I had hoped it would be old news after so long. After all, I’m not coming back to reclaim my rings.”

  “Although you are wearing them.”

  “Only for a visit.”

  Boone nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t expect there is any danger. But frankly, I was surprised to see you here. I thought that even if you were alive, you would not dare to come back. You have changed. In those days I thought you rather an amusing fellow, when you were allowed to be, but not very well attuned to reality.”

  “I don’t believe it’s possible to be in or out of tune with reality. After all, we live in it,” Millsy said. But Boone did not respond, nor did his gaze leave Millsy’s face. It was discomfiting. Millsy shifted in his chair in a vain attempt to get out from under the stare. An amusing fellow... not very well attuned to...

  Was that really what he had been back then? Had he been vastly unsuited for the Kirekuni mission? Had his failure been—oh, blasphemous thought—not due to his own mistakes, but the Royals’?

  There was no way of knowing. But it did not matter now.

  He met Boone’s gaze and laughed aloud. “Do you know what, Comptroller? I think you simply say whatever comes into your head.” He took a drink of sweet ale.

  Boone laughed: a prolonged rumble that carried out over the water. “I am still your friend, Gift. That is why I am telling you that you should not go to tea with Christina Gregisson.”

  “Who have you been entertaining while I lost my way in your damned tunnels?”

  “Christina,” Boone rumbled, glinting with joy.

  “Is she planning to feed me poisoned pastries?” Millsy laughed.

  Boone did not answer. He got up from his chair and stretched his massive shoulders. With the unhurried, rolling grace of the obese, he walked to the corner of the ledge, unhooked the front of his britches, and urinated into the reservoir. Millsy experienced a vague disgust as he watched the ripples spread into the drinking water of the masses of Kingsburg. “Even the Queen’s morning tea is made with water from my reservoir,” Boone observed as he returned to the assorted tables and chairs, on one of which Millsy sat. “A good joke, isn’t it?”

  “The Queen!”

  Sparkles of hilarity danced in the blue eyes. “Oh, come on, Gift! I thought you were past that.”

  “No one calls me Gift any more,” Millsy said stiffly.

  “Shall
I tell you what’s happened to you?” Boone steepled his fingers. “I’ve figured it out. You’ve lost your cynicism. And if you’ll pardon my saying so, that was the most amusing thing about you.”

  A torrent of words sprang into Millsy’s throat. Do you know how hard I struggled to lose my cynicism? It took me ten years and Queen knows how many setbacks to regain a measure of the innocence which I lost, not when I failed in Kirekune, but when I understood that because of that failure I must resign everything else in my life. Because it was all connected.

  “Perhaps you’re right.” He bowed his head to hide his face. He had to chew his lower lip until the blood came, just to hold back his laughter. Or was it tears? He cried very easily these days. It came from being a trickster. The men of Smithrebel’s saw it as evidence of his craziness, but the women understood him a little better. “It’s true that I’ve lost my feel for Kingsburg. The code of the court might as well be Kirekuni to me. I knew that tongue once, too. Have pity on me.”

  “Never fear,” Boone said, and hoisted himself to his feet. Millsy followed suit. “No, no, bring your glass. You are not drunk yet. I owe you that, at least, for old times’ sake! I think we’ve talked enough about the prize parrots in the palace. Come and see my daemons. I have two which I think you haven’t met. One was seventeen thousand, the other was twenty; you will enjoy trying your hand on them.” He shook his head. “Ahhh, where I’d be if I had trickster blood!”

  Millsy paced himself to match Boone’s slow strides as they entered a glare-lit archway in the cliff. “But I have no chance to practice with demogorgons. The beasts I use in my act are only small heartland ninnies. I have one southern daemon true-named Gallanis that is twelve feet tall—I got him cheaply in Naftha. But all I can do with them is make them jump through hoops and tie themselves in knots.”

  Boone shrugged. “You work in a circus, not a house of trickery.” Millsy knew the slur was unintentional. Everyone he had ever met—even those with democratic pretensions, like Boone—held the circus in low esteem. That was partly why Millsy himself had first been attracted to it.

  “True, true.” He laughed. “Do you know what? My act is like that stunt with macaws Sim used to do. Except that he had them on strings, poor creatures. Remember?”

  “Just wait until you see, Gift,” said Boone. “I have had a cave fitted especially for them.”

  They entered a big, brightly lit cavern where pale-faced young men were seated at desks. There was a smell of old books. All of the clerks scrambled to their feet and mumbled “Comptroller” as Boone and Millsy passed through. Millsy’s palms were wet with anticipation. He glanced sideways: a half smile slackened Boone’s normally expressive mouth. After all, they still shared one passion. It was a glimpse of this zest which had first interested Millsy in the comptroller. During his period of social decline, Millsy had tried his hand at every conceivable occupation. It had been through Boone, finally, that he discovered the quirk in his blood and his aptitude for trickery, a trade normally exclusive to women. And with Boone’s help, he began to see a way out of his dilemmas at court. Very quickly they had come to share that all-devouring, enthusiasm for the “business”; for a brief while, in Boone’s house in Xeremaches, they had been as close as lovers, and Millsy had mistakenly believed they shared other things as well.

  Now they had even less in common than they had ten years ago. But there were still daemons.

  There always had been daemons.

  The vibration became a real noise. Thump. Thump. And simultaneously: Clatter-rattle-ratter-clattle...

  There would always be daemons.

  They rounded a bend, hurrying now, and came out onto the floor of a wide shaft whose roof was visible high up in the light of brilliant glares that did not leave a pocket of shadow anywhere.

  “Sumenitas,” the comptroller of the waterworks said in an odd voice. “Dorennin.”

  Against opposed walls of the shaft, thirty-foot silver treadmills housed in wooden scaffolding were turning so fast that they blurred. A huge axle hung horizontally fifteen feet off the floor, connecting the treadmills at the hubs. An assortment of wooden gears—a transformation engine many times magnified—rose from the axle’s center into the roof, clanking and gnashing. And underneath that noise Millsy heard the booming of the pumps the engine drove, which sucked the water up from the reservoir into the pipes that ran beneath the streets of Kingsburg.

  “Hallo!” Boone shouted at the top of his lungs, advancing into the cavern.

  The handlers who stood guard, two to a treadmill, whipped around. For a minute Millsy thought they were going to crumple—as if the shattering of the tableau had shattered them, also. Then they dived for their levers, and the scent of burning rubber filled the air as massive brake pads contacted the sides of the treadmills. As the rpms decreased, the second handler of each pair ran up to his treadmill, carrying what looked like a seven-foot lance tipped with a silver spike. These they jammed into the mesh, into the flesh of the daemons inside. Millsy winced.

  The daemons were silent. Collared daemons could roar and groan, but not speak. Another attraction of Millsy’s little act (“The Only Exhibition of Wild Daemons to Tour the Domains in a Hundred Years!”) was the eerie jabbering of the daemons as they obeyed his commands. Sumenitas and Dorennin obeyed the cue of the lance and crouched on the bottoms of their treadmills without making a sound. Tears poured down their faces. Millsy noted the way they constantly picked up their hands and feet to avoid contact with the silver slats.

  One—Sumenitas, he guessed from the look of her—would have been about fifty feet tall standing upright. Her bones were coated with sweat-sheened mauve. Her breasts hung down like flaps. Even in the slave crop, her hair was bushy and black. Dorennin was shorter and stockier. His skin was pale, though his hands, feet, and joints, like Sumenitas’s, were wealed and infected. Silver slave collars two inches thick encircled necks covered with sores. They would never see a bath: their natural smell was so overpowering that most handlers preferred it masked by the smell of dirt and feces. They turned their heads languidly to see who had come in, eyes the size of brimming teacups.

  Oh, they were tricksy beasts! Demogorgons this big could only come from the Waste.

  “How do you know their true names?” he asked Boone softly.

  “I went myself into the northern Wraithwaste to buy them.” Boone, too, spoke in a near whisper. Now that the last of the gears had stopped moving, his voice echoed up into the heights of the shaft. “The trickster woman told me their names, for a fee.”

  Most trickster women would sooner die than reveal a single bit of their lore to one of alien biology. That was why Millsy himself had never ventured into the forests of the Wraithwaste, never tried to seek out a house of trickery and get the training that would enable him to exploit the abilities his blood conferred on him. He had known it would be a wasted effort. Boone’s bribe must have been handsome indeed.

  “Sumenitas.”

  “And Dorennin.”

  There were many twenty- and thirty-foot daemons currently in use in the waterworks. But these were prize specimens. If Millsy had been trained as a trickster, he would have been able to step in perfect safety up to the sides of the treadmills and caress them through the bars. (The handlers hung back a good ten paces, aware just how far the daemons’ auras of power extended, aware of the danger they were in. Boone would be rotating his men, putting different handlers on these daemons every day so that no man was numbed by the constant exertion of willpower that was necessary to keep the daemons calm enough that they didn’t lash out. About seventy years ago a daemon had broken loose from its cage. That had not been in the waterworks, but in the gasworks, which lay about ten miles outside the city. The deaths had numbered in the hundreds.)

  “Daemons are much like people,” Boone said. He was fingering a small silver-threaded whip that he had taken from a pocket of his half-cape. “One learns a good deal from handling them. What one learns is that they are stupid.�
��

  “They’re not.” Millsy shook his head absently. He did not have to argue; he knew. “They are as intelligent as we are. That should be obvious even to you. I don’t understand why handlers persist in believing them mindless.”

  “They are nothing like us.”

  “They do not think as we do. But they understand everything.”

  For the first time since they entered the cavern Boone looked at him. “Does it matter?” He laughed his deep, unhurried laugh. “They are ours. In my book, my friend, that which a man can best is not his equal.” He strode to Dorennin’s treadmill and flicked the whip through the metal. Millsy heard the faint hiss of silver contacting daemon flesh. A split second later he felt the power with which Dorennin lashed back at Boone. The comptroller leapt backwards, surprisingly fast for a man of his bulk, laughing as he deflected the invisible blow. Dorennin’s handlers rushed up to the treadmill as the furious giant threw himself at the mesh. The whole scaffolding shook. The axle turned a half-rotation. On the other side of the cave, Sumenitas pitched forward in her wheel. Gears clanked like falling rocks in the roof.

  The handlers pressed themselves against the mesh. Not for a second did they stop crooning to the daemon. Ugly motherfucking beast... dickless ogre that you, that you are... One of them, either bold or stupid, ripped one silver-woven glove off and stretched his hand into the cage. After an endless moment, the quivering giant let his head drop so that the handler could touch his neck, stroking around the cruel collar.

  Boone walked back toward Millsy, grinning broadly, wiping sweat from his face. “All right! Start ‘em up again!”

  Dorennin’s handlers withdrew. The daemons responded to the prodding lances. As the noise built, Boone shouted, “See what I mean? Eh?”

  Millsy nodded. “Just so long,” he shouted, grinning, “as you don’t let them get free!”